Need to freshen up your customer success manager resume?
Good idea.
Now, we have to face a bit of a different challenge — showing employers that you’re a champion when it comes to remote work. You can optimize your resume to make it clear and convince a hiring manager to contact you for an interview.
In this guide, we’re taking a look at resume writing tips for customer success managers. Here are 10 optimization techniques for four essential resume sections: skills, work experience, accomplishments, and education.
Skills
The best way to begin your customer success manager resume? Give recruiters a quick overview of your core skills, because they’re interested in them the most.
Here are the tips to optimize the skills section.
Be sure to add the essential skills
First things first: a customer success manager resume must offer a list of skills suggesting that you have the expertise needed to do the job. This means we need to start this section with the essential customer success manager skills.
Consider adding these skills to your list first:
- Empathy — shows that you understand how customers might feel toward a business, product, or service.
- Relationship building — these skills are necessary to start and maintain good relationships with customers, delivering on promises and deadlines, and obtaining valuable feedback and data.
- Teamwork — remote customer success managers are transparent about their time, availability, workload, share their calendar, communicate with and help other team members, and attend every meeting.
- Customer onboarding — customer success managers always support new clients after they make a purchase to help them benefit from the product or service
- Account management — shows that you worked with an account manager to customize software products according to a customer’s needs and goals (or managed customer accounts yourself)
- Problem-solving — customer success managers face various challenges during the customer lifecycle, so they need to know how to investigate them and create a plan to overcome them.
- Feedback giving — shows that you can provide effective feedback to a sales team after communicating with customers to help find those “aha” moments.
These essential customer success manager skills will make recruiters go “Oh, that must be a solid candidate.” We want you to make a good first impression even with a customer success manager’s resume immediately.
That first impression will keep recruiters interested and wanting to continue reading the resume. But before the recruiters’ eyes leave the Skills section, we’re going to show that you’re an excellent candidate for remote jobs, too.
Include remote work skills
Surveys suggest that almost 30% of the U.S. workforce will remain fully remote even after this year. So, chances are great you’re going to be doing a lot of work either remotely or with remote workers at your next position.
That’s why your customer success manager resume should mention remote work skills:
- Ability to work independently — shows that you’re confident making your own decisions, taking ownership of projects, and working without too much supervision
- Written communication skills — a lot of remote communication is written, so a good customer success manager should be able to write clearly and concisely
- Cross-cultural competence — customer success managers often work with remote teams from different countries, so they should be able to understand and appreciate different cultures and backgrounds
- Ability to use relevant apps — so many companies expect that you can use popular CRMs, service hubs, anti-churn software, customer education and experience platforms, and more, without the need for training
- Time management — working remotely requires high time management skills to plan all meetings and schedules, so having them on a customer success manager resume is a huge plus
- Listening skills — customer support is a big part of customer success manager’s routine, so they must be able to listen carefully and accurately to understand people’s concerns.
Having these skills in your customer success manager resume sends a clear signal for recruiters that you know how to work remotely.
Work Experience Optimization
The work experience section should be a collection of your latest three or four previous jobs. About 70% of recruiters experience to be the most important section for evaluating candidates, according to the 2020 Recruiter Nation report.
Also, recruiters know that about 48% of job seekers provide inaccurate info about their experience. So, being honest is the best policy here (and always).
Source: the 2020 Recruiter Nation report
Optimize this section by describing how helpful was your role in those companies, include some specifics like project results, and try not to mention professional jargon too many times.
List your previous remote positions first
Seeing other companies trusting you with a remote customer success position might be helpful to grab the attention of the recruiter. That’s why consider listing positions you held remotely on top of others, if possible.
Showing remote positions first would be your way of saying “Hey, I can work remotely, and I know what I’m doing.” This, combined with some accomplishments (see the next section), should send a powerful signal to recruiters reading your customer success manager resume.
Mention cross-sell and upsell experience
Consulting clients on company services and using upsell and cross-sell opportunities is a big part of a customer success manager’s work. So, be sure to mention some information about your upsell and cross-sell performance.
Add some specifics instead of just mentioning your skills, like:
- “Achieved upselling and cross-selling quarterly goals (8% of the revenue)”
- “Increased the company’s quarterly revenue goals by 5% by generating upsell/cross-sell deals with eight enterprise-level customers”
Many employers expect you to be able to use multi-channel communication strategies (email, phone, video meetings, etc.) to connect with and help their customers grow. That’s why adding information about your communication skills is a must-do.
Emphasize communication skills
Communication — both verbal and written — is important to customer success managers, but it became critical for successful remote work. That’s why we need to emphasize them in the work experience section.
Here are some examples of how to describe communication skills:
- “Conducted remote onboarding and management of clients from [country or multiple countries, time zones, regions, etc.]”
- “Wrote help articles and training video scripts for the company’s client portal”
- “Collaborated with the sales department for client onboarding and online training, resulting in a 12% increase in client satisfaction based on company surveys”
- “Communicated with over 100 customers and managed an increasing portfolio of new customers to help them increase sales with live chat software”
- “Conducted multiple live webinars and live Q&A sessions on using employee check-in apps on YouTube”
- “Organized training sessions for customer support teams to share the insights from conversations with customers.”
Try to mention responsibilities that showcase both verbal and written communication skills in your customer success resume.
For example, mentioning that you made an academic writing service review for a competitor comparison is a good example of writing skills. As for verbal communication, mention projects related to collaboration with sales and customer support teams and meetings with customers.
Pro tip:
Add specifics to each sentence describing your responsibilities from previous jobs.
Example—
You can improve “Conducted remote onboarding and management of clients” by adding a specific number of clients you have onboarded and/or managed.
Accomplishments
Your accomplishments in previous companies are an excellent way of showing a hiring manager that you have a history of meeting and going beyond goals and expectations.
Focus on high-quality accomplishments
High-quality accomplishments are those you can express in monetary terms, percentages, or otherwise numbers (dollar amounts, volumes, timeframes, etc.). These accomplishments will show hiring managers that you had some impact within your previous companies.
Ask yourself these questions to come up with high-quality accomplishments:
- “Did I reach my goals while I was working in that company? If yes, how fast did I do it?”
- “Did I save my previous companies any money? If yes, how much?”
- “Did I manage to generate some extra revenue from upsell and cross-sell opportunities? If so, exactly how much?”
- “How many clients did I serve? Was that number increasing?”
- Have I ever exceeded some deadlines on my projects? If yes, what was that shorter timeframe?
Pro tip:
Focus on more impressive achievements.
Let’s say, if you supervised a team between 10 and 40 employees, a good idea would be to mention the higher number, i.e. “Managed up to 40 employees.”
Or, let’s say you worked with clients using two marketing apps and improved their upgrade rates by 15% for the first one and by 35% for the second. You can write “Improved a marketing app client upgrade rate by 35%.”
Provide context for accomplishments
The reason that each measurable accomplishment should have context is that some numbers don’t mean much unless compared or added with others.
Here’s an example from a customer success manager resume:
“Managed a 10-person team and achieved $1 million in sales while increasing the average customer satisfaction rate from 60% to 81%.”
Let’s analyze this statement.
The first half says a person led a team to achieve $1 million in sales. It’s an impressive statement, but it lacks a bit of context. Is $1 million good? Compared to what? What was the result of the previous customer success manager? A good way to fix that is to include some kind of comparison with the performance of the previous team.
The second half of this statement is excellent and shows that the person helped to increase the rate by 21%. A great result, indeed. But there’s a way to make it better—indicate how much time it took to achieve that result. Including this information will make this accomplishment even more impressive.
Use less-specific superlatives for immeasurable accomplishments
Have some amazing accomplishments that can’t be expressed in dollars or percentages? No problem. You can add those and make them sound really impressive.
The trick is to use less specific superlatives like “highest,” “best,” “top-rated”, “most,” and “first.” By saying that achievement was “top-rated,” you might imply that a top manager had rated your project as such.
Here’s another example of how you can use “best” to describe your responsibilities in a previous company:
“Developed two best methods to evaluate and measure customer satisfaction with a new feature in a B2B app.”
Education Section
Customer success managers come from all kinds of educational backgrounds. The most common degrees they have are communications, marketing, and similar study areas.
Recruiters are careful when it comes to checking educational experience. They say that 26% of candidates “pad their resumes” in the education section, as the 2020 Recruiter Nation report found.
Source: the 2020 Recruiter Nation report
Consider these tips to make your education section informative and useful for recruiters.
Keep degree-related information concise
A degree in marketing or advertising is important, but your experience is what hiring managers are really interested in. That’s why try to write education-related information as concise as possible.
Consider mentioning this info only:
- Name of the school
- Degree
- Graduation year (optional).
Limiting this information to these three points means that your degree-related information shouldn’t exceed two lines. That’s totally fine because we have other more important things to share.
Share your certifications
A customer success manager resume should focus on certifications because they’re signaling that you keep your skills updated. A certification proves that you have a certain level of domain knowledge, which makes it easier for recruiters to evaluate your candidacy.
That’s why you can come across requirements mentioning various kinds of certifications in job postings. Like this one, which says that a candidate should have a certification in Facebook Ads to be considered.
So, if you have any certificates in customer success, be sure to add them to the education section. It would be much more useful for both you and the recruiter. Describe what skills it proves and the date of issue to give the recruiter a good idea of your expertise.
But what if you don’t have a certification?
No worries.
There’s plenty of good options online. In fact, you can get a basic customer success management certification from Udemy for around $20. Online learning platforms provide certifications for just about any branch of customer success knowledge, so consider checking your options.
Also, know that you can get industry-recognized certifications, too. They provide a course to teach you all the fundamentals of the profession and provide proof of various competency levels. The one from Cisco is one of the most popular and lasts for two years.
But also remember all certifications from industry authorities come with a price tag of at least a hundred dollars.
Conclusion
Here you go, now you know how to optimize your customer success manager resume to attract more attention from potential employers.
So, since we’re done here, head over to these remote work job boards! Check out what kind of remote jobs and requirements companies have and go from there.
Author Bio
Estelle Liotard has served as an editor, content advisor, and SEO team leader throughout her career, but now she is focused on editing and research. Apart from working as a chief editor at the academic writing service, she also contributes her research to online digital marketing publications. When she’s not working, Estelle learns pencil drawing and attends webinars on marketing.
